Talk:Harvard Law School

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Contents

[edit] Stub?

I wonder if this page should be marked as a stub to encourage building it out. After all, HLS is a major US law school, with many important activities (International Law, Negociation, Civil Rights, etc. etc. etc.) , and the only one of these activities that's mentioned is the Berkman Center. --Macrakis 17:58, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)


I agree. I'll mark it with a request for expansion, and maybe refer people to the talk page as to why. --Harro5 05:24, Apr 15, 2005 (UTC)
I added a list of other programs from the HLS website. Hopefully these can serve as a base for further additions by people more knowledgeable about particular programs.Frontleft 18:31, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Content migrated from the other spelling

The Berkman Center for Internet and Society is a department of Harvard Law School, which focuses on the legal study of cyberspace. The Center sponsors conferences, visiting lecturers, and residential fellows. Members of the Center do research and write books, articles, weblogs with RSS 2.0 feeds, for which the Center holds the specification, and podcasts, of which the first series took place at the Berkman Center. The Center's headquarters is a small Victorian wood-frame building next to the bigger brick-and-stone Harvard Law School buildings. Its newsletter, "The Filter", is on the Web and available by e-mail, and it hosts a blog community of Harvard faculty, students and Berkman Center affiliates. The Berkman Center is funding the Openlaw project.

Fellows have included David Weinberger, Ethan Zuckerman, Dave Winer, Jimbo Wales, Rebecca MacKinnon, John Perry Barlow, Wendy Seltzer, and Dr. James F. Moore.

Faculty have included Charles Nesson, Lawrence Lessig, Jonathan Zittrain, William "Terry" Fisher, and John Palfrey.

[edit] External links

[edit] Penn's Law School

According to the wikipedia entry for the University of Pennsylvania's Law school, it didn't officially start until well after Harvard's. I don't know which is correct, but one of them should be changed. N Vale 01:21, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

  • Probably best to check the history's of both on the school's websites and fix the Wikipedia entries accordingly. Thanks. Harro5 02:39, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Student activities list

This doesn't need to be in an encyclopedic entry, as all the list has are the names of organisations. Unless some of them are extremely notable, and that would be hard to imagine, then I'm going to leave the list on the cutting room floor. Please discuss it here if you disagree, and state why (notability is the only argument relevant). Harro5 05:38, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Maybe the Lincoln's Inn Society? It is notable enough to have its own article, and apears to count several Supreme Court Justices among its former members. Although the article itself is out of date (I believe HL Central is absorbing it) this indicates to me at least one org worthy of inclusion. -Lciaccio (talk) 02:28, 11 January 2008 (UTC) (An HLS Student, but member of neither club)

[edit] Charles Ogletree

Tell the Wikitruth! Why was the article about Professor Charles Ogletree completely deleted?

[edit] Cheerleading

The introductory paragraph's cheerleading for HLS borders on POV, if it doesn't cross the line. Is it really important to begin the article by emphasizing the various ways in which HLS is superior to its two closest competitors? A more objective take would focus on HLS's position in relation to law schools and the legal profession in general. I'll probably make some edits soon but wanted to give a chance for anyone to defend the current approach before doing so. Christopher M 21:31, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

From the intro "it is considered the world's most renowned law school" - I agree, this is not NPOV at all. This type of language is cheerleading. A more neutral stance would be (although still not NPOV) "it is considered one of the world's most renowned law schools." I think this section should be rewritten in a more neutral tone.

[edit] Adverts?

A few of the sections here look like ads for the different departments, which makes sense since they look like they were copied from the web pages. Can they be more neutral?

[edit] rankings paragraph

The ranking information on the Stanford, Harvard, & Yale (and perhaps other) law school pages seems disproportionate and over-emphasized in the early part of the article. Moreover it seems likely to encourage the kinds of disputes among afficionados of one school or the other tweaking endlessly to pull out particular rankings. I think on all these law schools that a general statement of prestigiousness & reference to the admittedly important US News rankings, historically contextualized, is useful. But comparisons b/w the different law schools are too specific for the top portion. I'm proposing to edit it down, but since it seems to be a frequently edited section in some of the articles I'm announcing for discussion here first. (Cross-posting to talk pages for SLS, HLS, YLS, maybe others.) --LQ 20:32, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] NPOV tag

I've added an NPOV tag to the article, which almost reads like an ad for HLS. (I'll probably be doing the same to the YLS and SLS pages shortly, depending on what I think of them.) The intro is particularly egregious; it consists entirely of positive information about the school. See WP:NPOV Elliotreed 04:31, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Exactly what do you think the article should look like? And why are you only looking at HLS, YLS, and SLS? There are plenty of articles on Wikipedia that have don't have that much negative information - check out George Washington, for example... the intro there seems equally egregious. You might also want to look at the Martin Luther King Jr article, as well as the Gandhi one. MaskedEditor 06:58, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
What's problematic isn't so much the presence of positive information as the general presentation and the way even neutral information is downplayed in favor of positive information. For an example of a better page, look at Harvard University. If the Harvard intro were like the HLS intro, it would scrap all e.g. the historical information in favor of information about its U.S. News ranking, comparisons to Yale and Princeton, and a list of U.S. Presidents who went to Harvard. Elliotreed 15:23, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
I see what you mean now, that sounds fine to me. I suspect the difference is partly due to the fact that the positive information is easier to access than historical information. MaskedEditor 18:38, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Worklife Wizzard

Is there a reason for this section's outright deletion? Cjs2111 23:58, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

I think the whole Program section should be removed, personally MaskedEditor 12:57, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
Not all of it; some (like the Berkman Center) are important. They should, however, be reduced in size. Cjs2111 21:52, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
I guess... I'd rather just see mention of them if they are notable and a historical / defining part of the school (for example, the law review). For the other programs, I'd like to see links to separate articles, if they are notable enough. I don't know why I feel this way... maybe it's just because each program seems to be such a non-important part of the school. Or maybe it's that so many of them are started up and have yet to have anything to show for them... they just don't seem established enough for such an old organization. MaskedEditor 02:35, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Edits to remove cheerleading -- consider removing the NPOV warning tag

I re-worked the introduction to remove the cheerleading. The USN&WR ranking discussion is gone, as well as the alumni boasting, and the declaration that HLS is the "the most prestigious." I made follow-on changes in the body of the article to accomodate these changes. To fill out the introduction, I moved up the discussion of Dean Langdell's contributions to modern legal education, because that material seems to have legitimate signficance deserving inclusion in the opening of the article. Please consider removing the NPOV tag. Thanks.

I believe that this article no longer deserves the NPOV tag. The writing seems factual and non-cheerleading in style. Does anyone wish to speak out against removing the tag? Fuzzzone 10:48, 9 July 2007 (UTC)
Since no one has objected to the proposed removal of the NPOV tag, I am going to remove it now. Fuzzzone 23:20, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Shield

Can anyone figure out how to restore the shield image in the infobox? I can't understand why it's not working. Cjs2111 (talk) 19:01, 28 December 2007 (UTC)